Software Requirements Analysis

NEWS AND ACTIVITIES (in reverse chronological order)

October 2008

The Northwest RFC (NWRFC) hosted a workshop in early August to discuss with Deltares the NWS RFC operational needs for an interactive forecasting GUI. This workshop is sometimes referred to as "the IFP workshop", referring to the Interactive Forecast Program (IFP) in NWSRFS. The 3-day session was extremely productive, with screen mock-ups being generated in real time, and a keen interest on the part of Deltares in making some suggested improvements to FEWS. Among other things participants were able to show Deltares some of the "IFP companion" tools they use, and also described some of the more desirable features coming with AWIPS II. Deltares demonstrated some early concepts and their progress at the CHPS Preparation workshop in September.

HSEB’s developers continued the process of migrating selected NWSRFS models and operations into the new CHPS framework. We have made great progress; migrated versions of all but two of the models identified for the CHPS Baseline Operational Capability (BOC) have been provided to Deltares for testing in combination with the next release of the Delft-FEWS package. Work is underway to complete and test those two operations as well as beginning the migration of the five additional model operations which will be needed by the remaining RFCs. In addition, developers are implementing changes in several models to mesh with the CHPS design for real-time MODs. We expect to meet the goal of delivering all of the BOC models by December, 2008 and the remaining models by March, 2009.

During this quarter, the developers also completed, tested and deployed to the CHPS Acceleration Team (CAT) RFCs an enhanced version of the ofsde program which will extract additional information for storage in the database within CHPS. We have created and are currently testing software for the second phase of the data process, which will pass the ofsde data to the internal Delft-FEWS database ingest process and transfer data from CAT RFCs to Deltares to support CHPS testing and transition activities.

The BOC for CHPS includes a long-term ensemble capability equivalent to the one available in NWSRFS. While Delft-FEWS already incorporates a climatology-based ensembles capability, the CAT requested that OHD migrate the esp and espadp software applications from NWSRFS to CHPS. So far, esp has been migrated; and a model adapter has been developed that will allow for Delft-FEWS to generate esp format binary files that can be read and displayed within espadp (a slightly modified version of the AWIPS OB9.0 baseline copy). These enhancements will provide the necessary CHPS BOC functionality until the much greater capabilities of XEFS become available. Note that this effort is independent of the XEFS project work described below.

Sudha Rangan, who was the software architect for the CHPS project and lead developer of the OHD components of the CHPS Pilot system, left in early July to return to India. She will be greatly missed. Meanwhile Lee Cajina has assumed the technical leadership of the CHPS software development efforts and with the help of the entire team, is successfully meeting or exceeding all of the HSEB software development goals.

On March 24 2008 Apex Digital Systems, Inc. (Apex) delivered the final version of their document entitled "FEWS Pilot Results". This document captures results from interviews conducted with the CAT RFCs in January 2008. The document provided useful information for the "Software Migration Mapping" document being developed by Deltares. Deltares has also been running a "lite" version of the NWSRFS provided to them by the CAT, which Deltares uses for analysis along with information contained in the online NWSRFS documentation.

Deltares made significant progress on the migration mapping document during a visit between Deltares and OHD the week of April 14. Discussions allowed Deltares and OHD to establish most of the key implementation milestones and identify software development responsibilities for OHD and Deltares.

Meanwhile, the CAT identified requirements for a CHPS Baseline Operational Capability (BOC), defined to be the minimal set of functionality required at the CAT RFCs to migrate to CHPS as the primary (or sole) system for flood forecasting. The CAT has now completed the BOC requirements document.